{"id":2545,"date":"2010-04-13T00:00:37","date_gmt":"2010-04-13T05:00:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/?p=2545"},"modified":"2010-04-13T00:03:42","modified_gmt":"2010-04-13T05:03:42","slug":"social-media-shillery","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/2010\/04\/13\/social-media-shillery\/","title":{"rendered":"Social Media Shillery"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Helena Guergis, Member of Parliament {Independent} for Simcoe-Grey in Ontario<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n
Notes from north of 49\u00baN<\/em><\/div>\n
My last post on the Toronto Sun<\/a><\/strong> featured a photo of Helena Guergis, who was the cover story for a brewing scandal in Parliament that caused her to resign her cabinet position and get turfed from the Conservative caucus. I’ll hold off from commenting on that story, as it’s evolving and includes an RCMP probe<\/a><\/strong>.<\/div>\n
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It hasn’t been a good year for Guergis. Earlier in the year, she had a meltdown on her birthday where she yelled at airport staff in Charlottetown, PEI. A few weeks ago, there was another incident which I found to be interesting. Apparently, one of her staffers used a pseudonym and posted a pro-Guergis comment in a local paper, after someone posted a negative comment about Guergis.\"YouTube<\/a><\/span><\/span><\/div>\n
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Guergis tried to smooth things over, but in the CBC report, some residents of her riding {Simcoe-Grey<\/a><\/strong>} were put off by this. A while back, one of my students had a corporate internship where their job was to scan Internet discussion groups and plant positive “word-of-mouth”. I’ve always wondered the degree to which paid or volunteer shills were doing similar work in social media, particularly on comments on news articles. I have no idea how prevalent, if at all, this practice is, but I would hazard to guess that there is a great temptation to use social media to generate as much advantage as possible.<\/div>\n
I don’t think it’s too much to ask for that politicians and their staff follow a policy of transparency when it comes to communications. It’s fine to advocate for a position or a candidate, but if you’re somehow affiliated with a politician’s office, full disclosure would be the best policy and there should be rules that enforce this. In this day and age of tracking IP addresses and websleuthery, I’m convinced that 95%+ of users have no idea of how trackable they are and pseudonyms only go so far.<\/div>\n
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Twitterversion::<\/strong> MP staffer caught posting comments on newspaper’s website w\/a pseudonym & causes backlash. How improper is such shillery? @Prof_K<\/a><\/div>\n
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Song::<\/strong> Matchbox 20-‘Bed of Lies’<\/div>\n

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Notes from north of 49\u00baN My last post on the Toronto Sun featured a photo of Helena Guergis, who was the cover story for a brewing scandal in Parliament that caused her to resign her cabinet position and get turfed from the Conservative caucus. I’ll hold off from commenting on that story, as it’s evolving […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":160,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[4295,4293,4294,1526,732,763,4292],"class_list":["post-2545","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-bed-of-lies","tag-helena-guergis","tag-matchbox-20","tag-notes-from-north-of-49n","tag-social-media","tag-web-20","tag-word-of-mouth"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2545","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/160"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2545"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2545\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2550,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2545\/revisions\/2550"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2545"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2545"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/thickculture\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2545"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}